Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2022
Winter 2022-2023: Poetry
TERRA INFERNA
by Sara Henning
Winner of the 2022 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by December 31
This long-running poetry manuscript prize gives $1,000 and publication by Ohio University Press. Excerpted from Henning's winning collection Terra Incognita, a sequence of elegies following her mother's death from colon cancer, this poem imagines a young woman's unrealized potential to resist a male lover who erases her like one of his artworks.
ELEGY FOR A CITY
by Angelo Mao
Winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Award
Entries must be received by December 31
Winners of this manuscript contest receive $1,000 and publication by Burnside Review Press, a literary publisher in Portland, Oregon. Mao's debut collection, Abattoir, brings a poetic consciousness to his work with lab mice as a Harvard research scientist. This poem uses Laplace's Law that "describes a balloon taking air from another" as a metaphor for China's takeover of Hong Kong in 2020.
A MOMENT CAUGHT IN TIME
by Joanne Jagoda
Winner of the 2022 Gemini Magazine Poetry Open
Entries must be received by January 3
This accessible online journal gives prizes up to $1,000 in their annual contest for unpublished poems. Jagoda's winning piece, accompanied by an archival family photo, poignantly reflects on the divergent fates of her ancestors.
ZUIHITSU FOR THE NEW DIASPORA
by Sahar Muradi
Winner of the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by February 28
This competitive annual award for poetry manuscripts is sponsored by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. The 2023 guidelines are in process; the deadline is usually the end of February. Muradi's Octobers was the most recent winner. A zuihitsu is a Japanese literary form composed of free-associative thought fragments or loosely connected short personal essays. In this piece, the speaker begins "in Cornwallville, thinking of Kabul," preparing to give birth in America while reflecting on the different forms of displacement that her fellow Afghanis experience.
Summer 2022: Poetry
ODE TO THE CORPSE FLOWER
by Benjamin Garcia
Winner of the 2021 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: August 31
This free contest from Utica University awards $2,000 to a poetry collection by a resident of Upstate New York that was published between July 1 of the previous year and June 30 of the deadline year. Garcia's debut collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the most recent contest. In this brash and humorous poem, he defies those who would make him desexualized and tame: "I won't be anyone's nosegay…never let a man speak for you or call you//what he wants".
KWASIADA
by Kweku Abimbola
Winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets First Book Award
Entries must be received by September 1
Formerly known as the Walt Whitman Award, this prestigious contest offers $5,000 and publication by Graywolf Press for a debut collection. Abimbola's Saltwater Demands a Psalm was the most recent winner. This imaginative elegy for Trayvon Martin, part of a series commemorating Black men and boys killed by police, allows grief to arise from the gap between what is and what could have been.
WAITING FOR THE HEAT TO BREAK INTO RAIN
by Michael McGriff
Winner of the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Series
Entries must be received by September 30
This prize from the University of Arkansas Press, for writers at any stage of their career, gives $5,000 and publication for a full-length poetry manuscript. This compressed, tense poem from McGriff's winning collection Eternal Sentences places a child in a rural landscape filled with omens of death.
SAINT MICHAEL, THE SERPENT & THE RED LOBSTER
by Janine Certo
Co-winner of the 2022 Longleaf Press Book Contest
Entries must be received by December 15
This full-length book contest from a well-established small press gives $1,000 and publication. Certo's O Body of Bliss shared the most recent prize with Christopher Buckley's One Sky to the Next. This wry, nostalgic poem contrasts Biblical prohibitions with the everyday sacraments of a Gen-X childhood, finding more transcendence in girls' sports and the ritual of family dinners at Red Lobster than in the pronouncements at Mass.
Spring 2022: Fiction and Nonfiction
HEROIN CHIC
by Rebecca Bernard
Winner of the 2021 Non/Fiction Collection Prize
Entries must be received by March 11
This $1,500 award for a manuscript of short fiction, essays, or a combination of the two includes publication by Mad Creek Books, the trade imprint of Ohio State University Press. Bernard's Our Sister Who Will Not Die: Stories was the most recent winner. This relentlessly self-questioning essay holds space for both the romance and the sordidness of drug abuse, while acknowledging her privilege in walking away (mostly) unscathed.
COLLUVIUM
by Meredith Clark
Winner of the 2021 Sonora Review Essay Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
Sonora Review awards prizes of $1,000 each for a story and essay on an annual theme. The 2022 theme is "Rage". Clark's poetic, fragmentary piece about girlhood and trauma was the nonfiction winner for 2021's "Extinction" themed contest.
HUNGER
by Matthew Cheney
Winner of the 2014 Hudson Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
This long-running award from Black Lawrence Press gives $1,000 and publication for a collection of poetry or short stories. Cheney's prizewinning debut story collection, Blood: Stories, was published in 2016. In this haunting new story from The Dark magazine, an estranged daughter discovers—or imagines?—the horrifying way that her father has dealt with bereavement.
DEAR BARBIE ARM ON THE CORNER OF FIFTH AND MARKET
by Kelle Schillaci Clarke
Winner of the 2022 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents
Entries must be received by April 17
This fiction prize for writers with at least one child under age 10 awards $1,000, a year of mentorship, publication in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, and a reading at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon in New York City. In this evocative flash piece, a broken toy prompts the narrator to reflect on the heartache of raising a young girl under patriarchy and the threat of the pandemic.
